And finally, a push version that uses SPDY server push to push all of the images directly into Chrome's chache after the first request:

SPDY/3 push: 0.74 seconds.

Since I am doing all of this comparing, I might as well see what vanilla HTTP looks like:

HTTP: 2.7 seconds.

Important the SPDY vs HTTP comparison is not a fair one. Because of some deficiencies in Speed Tracer, it is not possible to include the SSL handshake in addition to the initial SPDY connection. The SPDY connection is from a cold start (I stop the server before each). Still, the SSL handshake would add ~0.5 seconds to the entire conversation, meaning that SPDY is still an easy winner.

For completeness' sake, spdy/2 looks like:

SPDY/2: 1.25 seconds.

And SPDY/2 with push:

SPDY/2: 1.03 seconds.

So the final tally is:

Trial

Time (s)

SSL

5.03

spdy/3

1.1

spdy/3 push

0.74

HTTP

2.7

spdy/2

1.25

spdy/2 push

1.03

I am unsure why the spdy/3 numbers both beat the corresponding spdy/2 numbers. I would expect them to be about the same since spdy/3 adds flow control, but little to speed up this particular page. For now, I chalk it up to small number statistics—I only ran one run for each.

Regardless, the clear winner is SPDY. Tomorrow, I will repeat the spdy/3 part of the experiment with Chrome and Firefox—this time watching TCP traces. That should serve as a nice last word on spdy/3 flow control.

I am very much new to Web development and I have to do a comparison of http, https and spdy (or http 2.0).

how can I test and compare the page load time from a browser (client) by switching to different versions of http? e.g. I want to test what is the PLT for http 1.0 versus 1.1 and 2,0.. how can I configure my browser?